Twenty-seven seconds along Wednesday night, Montreat guard Terrell Mosley delivered a perfect ally-oop pass to Austin Harrison, who threw down a vicious dunk to briefly lift the Cavaliers into a 2-2 tie with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Up in the McKenzie Arena stands, former Moc point guard Wes Moore grinned a wide grin, immediately recognizing the backdoor cut that led to the dunk.
“We opened every game with that when I was here,” said Moore, who roomed with Montreat coach Lincoln Walters for two years during their UTC playing careers.
“It was something to get the crowd into the game. It’s been a long time since I threw that pass. And I can promise you it was a lot easier throwing it to a guy who played in the NBA [Johnny Taylor], a guy who could touch the top of the backboard square, than the guys Lincoln’s coaching.”
Alas, the first offensive play of the game was as good as it got for Walters’ NAIA scrappers. The Cavs never led, were tied for just that one moment and ultimately lost 89-51 in the opening round of the Dr Pepper Classic.
While UTC moves on to tonight’s championship final against Georgia State at 7 p.m., Montreat returns at 4:30 this afternoon to face Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in the consolation game.
Said Walters, a member of the Mocs’ Sweet 16 team in 1997, “It wasn’t what we wanted it to be. We wanted it to be competitive. But we’re an NAIA school with three and a half scholarships. If you don’t work the way you should at UTC’s level, they may take away your scholarship. At our level it’s different. The passion’s not always there.”
Moore will tell you the passion was always there during Walters’ playing career, even if the playing minutes weren’t.
“We’d lay in bed at night talking about what we’d do if we were coaches, changes we’d make,” grinned Moore, who now coaches the Signal Mountain High School varsity team.
“Lincoln always wanted to be a coach.”
UTC coach John Shulman believes Walters is going to be a good one.
“They’re going to be tough to play on their level,” he said. “I was impressed with Lincoln’s team. They play hard, they play smart. And I think it’s pretty neat he came back here. He’s a part of something pretty special here. He can point to that Sweet 16 season and say, ‘That’s my year, that’s my banner.'”
Walters said the ally-oop play was intentional. He also said his Cavs run a lot of the same zone offense that Mack McCarthy’s teams ran when he played.
And he spoke more than once of, “The habit of winning,” that McCarthy instilled in his teams.
When someone asked if he worked Montreat as hard as McCarthy once worked him, Walters — whose glasses, brown suit and tie made him look more like an English professor than a coach — smiled and said, “No, but my players would probably say we do.’
Mosley concurred, saying, “Coach demands excellence on the court and off.”
He also said, “We really wanted to win this game for him.”
To win with three-and-a-half scholarships at the NAIA level against a Division I program that’s reached the NCAA Tournament twice in Shulman’s first six seasons is next to impossible.
Playing hard and smart and tough, 4-7 Montreat’s best finish against a Division I foe was an 18-point loss to Charleston Southern.
Yet asked to compare these Mocs to the other five major college programs he’s faced, Walters quickly said, “UTC’s by far the best. And I’m not just saying that because I played here.”
Everybody starts somewhere. A college tennis player, Shulman toiled for years as an assistant before guiding the Mocs to the NCAA Tournament during his first season in charge in 2005. Let Walters — a former high school coach — take a team brought together by three and a half scholarships and lead it to the NAIA playoffs and he may one day return here as a D-I head coach.
But 30 minutes after Wednesday’s loss, Walters exited McKenzie as you might expect an NAIA coach 12 years out of college to look. Having traded in his suit for a pair of blue jeans, he climbed the stairs between sections 104 and 103, garment bags and coaching satchels strung over both shoulders.
“I just hope we can come back next year,” he said. “Such a warm, warm welcome. It was so nice to come back here and feel appreciated.”
Of course, that often happens when former players who had a habit of winning return, even if the same fans who once cheered them are now happy to see them lose.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com and 423-757-6273.